A House Full of Strangers: Based on True Stories is a collection of 11 short stories and 2 novellas, about Ukrainian immigrant landadies, their families, and their tenants. Though the stories are fiction, I created them by weaving truth with my imagination. One novella is inspiring, the other sexy and funny. The short stories range from sweet tales to heartbreaking ones. The book is available for PRE-ORDER now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, and more.
Inspiration for A House Full of Strangers
My mother was a Ukrainian immigrant landlady. Until I got married at nineteen, I lived in a rooming house, the kind of house that inspired me to write A House Full of Strangers. My mother was the one who rented the rooms, kept the roomers happy, and my father helped out any way he could.
My life began in a rooming house on Manitoba Avenue in Winnipeg (the detached house on the far right of the photo below). My parents had rented the house from the woman who lived next door. Mom and Dad got roomers by putting a sign, Room to Let, in the front window, hoping to catch the eye of any single person, man or woman, who happened to walk by and wanted a room with a bed.
My parents were both Ukrainian immigrants; they had jobs which took them away from home six days a week. During the hours in the evenings or on weekends, they laundered the roomers’ sheets, emptied their garbage, vacuumed the hallways, and cleaned the bathrooms. Baba, my grandmother Lukia Mazurec, stayed home with me. She was a loving woman and I learned a lot about her when I wrote Sunflowers Under Fire, a story about her ordeal in Ukraine during WWI, the Bolshevik revolution, and the civil unrest that followed.
When I was five, we moved from Manitoba Avenue to Austin Street (still in the North End of Winnipeg). Mom and Dad had saved enough money to buy a rooming house of their own. We lived there for three years, until they had paid it off by working around the clock.
Then, when I was eight, Mom quit having a produce stall at the City Public Market on Main Street and we moved to a grand rooming house in Fort Rouge. We now had two floors of roomers above our living quarters and Mom had to stay home to manage the needs of those above us.
Living in a rooming house proved to be a rich experience for a writer, an occupation I never dreamed of doing until much later in my life, when I began writing mostly novels. However, in 2025, I wrote a non-fiction self-help book, Along Came A Gardener, based on my many years as a family therapist working in mental health.
Writing A House Full of Strangers turned out to be another departure for me. My short story collection is drawn from my memories and imagination. The characters are fictitious but they are based on real people. And yes, the roomers were strangers, as they came and went privately. We had little to do with them, unless they knocked on our door about some problem upstairs, like a light bulb that needed replacing or a plugged toilet. Dad was the handyman, and Mom took care of the linens and such. They also dealt with any complaints about fellow tenants who were too noisy, or taking too long in the bathroom.
But on occasion, Mom would invite a roomer down for coffee or even supper. When she had a girls only rooming house, she acted like a den mother to the girls, who were young and single. She occasionally counselled them about their love affairs and such.
I enjoyed writing this book and plan to write more short stories. But first, I’m on track to write another novel.
